Email Newsletter Growth Tips | Exclusive Interview with Greg Johnson

Full video transcript

The interview opens with Kelly introducing Greg Johnson to talk about email newsletter growth. Johnson shares his background: he started a B2B business years ago built around email and phone outreach to an existing customer list, which drove about 50% of month-over-month revenue and helped the business hit a seven-figure run rate within five months. That experience, he says, taught him the critical importance of controlling your own customer data so you can nurture relationships repeatedly rather than needing to find new customers every month. He’s since moved into ecommerce and digital marketing, helping clients run crowdfunding campaigns and email-driven product launches, including one ecommerce client who can generate $100,000 in ten hours from a single email to their list. He frames email’s core advantage as control: unlike social media, where you don’t know when or if your audience will see a post, email lets you put an offer in front of your entire audience at once, use deadlines and scarcity effectively, and operate on a platform you own rather than one subject to someone else’s algorithm.

Kelly asks Johnson to walk through the newsletter lifecycle from scratch. He starts with platform selection: for ecommerce businesses tied to their own website, he recommends Klaviyo, Sendlane, or MailerLite because they integrate with store data on cart activity and purchases. For newsletter-as-product businesses, he favors Beehiiv (built by former Morning Brew staff, who sold their newsletter for eight figures, and shipping roughly one major product update per week) or ConvertKit, which he calls the long-standing “gold medal” option for creators and info-product businesses. He also mentions ActiveCampaign as solid, and explicitly steers people away from MailChimp, which he sees as a legacy provider that hasn’t kept up with innovation relative to its pricing. Kelly and Johnson briefly compare ConvertKit’s product-embedding features against Beehiiv’s subscription and advertising marketplace focus, agreeing there’s no one-size-fits-all choice and encouraging due diligence.

Johnson then covers niche and positioning: once the platform is set, creators need a clear target audience and some unique angle, since newsletters that try to cover everything at once tend to feel like an overwhelming “link dump” and stop growing. He points to AI-tool newsletters as an example — some are prompt-focused, some track new tools, some do comparisons — and says the successful ones commit to one clear format and stay consistent. His favorite differentiator is injecting personal voice and perspective, even when using generative AI for content creation, because a distinct personal voice is far harder to copy than a generic brand voice, and people connect faster with a person than with a faceless logo.

Kelly asks how solo creators can avoid the newsletter collapsing if they stop producing content personally. Johnson offers two mitigations: training a model on your own writing so content generation can continue in your voice (he notes this is hard to do well but some people succeed), or restructuring the newsletter as a team effort with multiple credited or uncredited writers operating under a consistent set of content pillars, similar to how a band can swap members while the band’s identity persists.

On content planning, Johnson explains he doesn’t always keep a content pipeline stocked in advance, but stresses that consistent publishing matters more than perfect timing. He uses tools like ChatGPT for outlines and structure, then writes final copy himself. He describes two writer temperaments — people who write top-to-bottom from a single idea, and people who need a full outline first — and says understanding your own style helps you plan more effectively. His personal content approach centers on delivering unexpected insights that build trust: he confirms what an audience already believes, introduces a contrarian twist, backs it up with a story, and often builds toward an offer even when he isn’t presenting one that day. He contrasts this with ecommerce content cadence, which he frames as ongoing value and problem-solving content with occasional product mentions, warning that ecommerce brands who only send discount promotions quickly cheapen the newsletter experience and see open and click rates decline.

Discussing growth and launch tactics, Johnson’s central metric for newsletter quality is whether people open emails because of the sender name rather than the subject line — a sign the content itself has earned trust. For launch, he recommends starting with your existing personal network: your own audience, personal contacts, and social accounts, citing creators who’ve gotten their first thousand subscribers by texting personal contacts a signup link. From there, he describes “structured intentional growth” using organic social media: publishing newsletter content as a website post (a feature he highlights in Beehiiv and Substack) with a subscriber-only break partway through, so non-subscribers reading via a social link have to subscribe to see the rest. He also describes teasing upcoming content on social media to build anticipation, and incentivized referral programs — he personally sends physical gifts to his top referrers because it’s cheaper than the ad spend equivalent.

On migrating an existing list to a new newsletter, Johnson advises always notifying subscribers and giving them a choice, either an opt-out (grows the list faster, some subscribers less engaged) or a required opt-in (smaller list, much higher engagement). He stresses this because Gmail tightened spam enforcement around February 2024: crossing roughly a 3% spam complaint rate in a month can get a sender blacklisted from all Gmail inboxes, so a smaller, cleaner, more engaged list is safer than a large one prone to complaints.

On monetization, Johnson lays out a spectrum: direct product sales (highest revenue share, highest workload), affiliate marketing (a percentage cut of sales for promoting others’ products), and sponsorships or ad placements once a list reaches meaningful scale, which can be sold per-click or as a flat rate. He notes advertisers increasingly want the kind of targeted reach newsletters can offer given their niche focus. He also shares a validated pre-sell tactic: he emailed his 80 most engaged VIP subscribers with a poll about a proposed 90-day coaching program, including a direct Stripe payment link for anyone ready to buy immediately, and sold out the offer two weeks before its planned Black Friday launch with no landing page or sales emails. He recommends this approach broadly — asking your list what they want, then creating and selling exactly that, which reduces cash flow risk and confirms demand before building anything.

The interview closes with Johnson reiterating that an email list is “the core asset of any online business” because of the reach, control, and revenue it can drive, and encouraging anyone who hasn’t started to begin now — or, if unsure of direction, to subscribe to ten newsletters in their niche to study what works before starting their own. He points viewers to his own newsletter, Email Magic, for more.